Legends

Athletics New Zealand has a history that deserves to be valued, preserved, and promoted. The Legends section of our website is a key part of the process. It makes available informed biographies of our greatest athletes and coaches in a form readily accessible by all. The texts in Legends are freely available for citation, preferably with the courtesy of acknowledgement.

We will continue to add to this collection, as we fill gaps and add our more recent outstanding Olympic, Paralympic, and World competitors such as Dame Valerie Adams, Peter Martin and Tom Walsh. Legends is offered here in the belief that the achievements of New Zealand’s past are a living part of its present and its future.

Athletics is New Zealand’s most successful Olympic sport, with ten gold medals, and twenty-three medals in all. National pride in that history also embraces the Paralympic medalists in track and field, and the many international victories gained by New Zealand runners and teams in major marathons, road races, cross-country, and mountain running.

No historian of New Zealand’s achievements and culture as a nation could fail to take account of these successes in athletics. They have made a unique contribution to shaping New Zealand as the accomplished, self-confident, and diverse nation it is. In official recognition of that contribution, five of our athletes have been elevated to damehoods or knighthoods, and many more have received public honours.

We invite visitors to this site to relive the achievements of Dr Jack Lovelock, Dame Yvette Williams Corlett, Sir Peter Snell, Sir Murray Halberg, Eve Rimmer BEM, Sir John Walker and many more.

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